According to the Redlands city manager’s proposed budget, 31 police dispatchers, community service officers, crime scene investigators, crime analysts, records clerks, animal control officers, recreation and senior center employees and fire and police administrative secretaries out of 52 of these individuals are now facing layoffs.

I want to make absolutely clear to you, the citizens, that the loss of these highly trained, skilled and dedicated individuals can have no other effect than to render the city of Redlands a more dangerous place for its residents.

These latest proposed cuts of

$4.2 million come on top of the loss of over $2.5 million over the last two years from the Police Department’s budget for a total of $6.7 million. In addition to the 18 police officer positions that have gone unfilled as a result, over 20 full- and part-time civilian positions were eliminated. Almost all of those civilian positions were directly responsible for the delivery of services to the community. These positions were also dispatchers, cso, forensic specialists, animal control officers and records clerks. The loss of each of these positions absolutely has impacted the ability of the department to deliver service. As many citizens will tell you, currently, unless you have an actual emergency, you will have to wait for service, often for several hours. If these new proposed cuts take place, I would not be surprised if wait times increased from hours to a day or more.

The Redlands policing model is predicated upon having a civilian staff in place handling the routine calls for service and administrative functions of the department so that police officers are available for both emergency calls and proactive policing, like traffic enforcement, gang enforcement, sex offender compliance sweeps, and parole/probation checks. Without the civilian staff, the police officers will be pulled from the street and placed behind a desk to perform these administrative functions for more than double the cost of a civilian employee.

We should also be clear that police officers assigned to perform these clerical or administrative functions will not be able to simply drop them and respond if there is an emergency. Almost all of the clerical and administrative work also has a finite time limit in which it must be completed. These time limits are set by the state and federal government and are not flexible. For example, the reports for arrests must be typed, assembled and be at the District Attorney’s Office within 48 hours, or the suspect will be released back into the community.

Some other examples of administrative duties that will now have to be performed by police officers are the processing and collation of arrest reports, registration and entry of the approximately 90 sex-offenders living in Redlands into the Megan’s law website, providing traffic and burglary reports to insurance companies so that victims can be reimbursed, district attorney, Superior Court and subpoena compliance. There are many, many more examples but my point is that certainly there is a better, more efficient use for a police officer’s time than tasks like data entry, scanning and copying reports.

In addition to all the aforementioned, possibly the greatest threat to the safety of our community that would result from the proposed budget cuts is the ability of the department to identify perpetrators by investigating and processing crime scenes for evidence. This ability will be nearly eliminated as a result of the proposed cuts. Currently, the forensic supervisor and the four patrol CSOs, who are all state-certified crime scene investigators, provide forensic services to the city 24 hours a day, seven days a week either on-duty or on-call. Last year, the members of this team lifted over 900 fingerprints from crime scenes and identified almost 300 different suspects from them. In many of these cases the only thing linking the suspect to the crime was the forensic evidence collected by these individuals.

After the proposed cuts, forensic services will only be available from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. four days a week, with no one on-call for “after hours” crime scenes.

Anything additional or “after hours” will either be outright ignored, forced to wait – potentially for several days until a certified investigator returns to duty – or have to be processed by police officers, who certainly will do the best they can, but who are neither trained nor certified for this type of work.

As we in law enforcement know, criminals do not commit one crime and then sit idly by waiting to be caught. They commit crime after crime and will continue to do so until they are identified and arrested. By handcuffing the department’s ability to process crime scenes, I assure you more Redlands residents will be victimized because these same criminals will go unidentified.

Citizens, I ask you to contact your City Council members. Explain to them how much the safety of your home and business means to you.

Council members, I urge you in the strongest terms to weigh and consider carefully the multitude of negative impacts to the safety and security of our citizens that will result from the proposed cuts during your budget deliberations.

Mike Russ is president of the Redlands Civilian Safety Employees Association.